Capitol

The new dawn didn’t. There was to be no more sturm und drang, no more brinkmanship, no more government shutdowns, no more threats of default on America’s debt. Just routine passage of a $1,100,000,000,000 spending bill to keep the government running until next September when the current fiscal year ends. In the event, it was only hours before midnight on Thursday, when funding of most government activities was scheduled to end, that the House of Representatives, by a vote of 219-to-206 passed the so-called continuing resolution that will keep all of the functions of government, both the necessary and the wasteful, in operation. No, it was not a split in the Republican party that brought us once again to the brink of shutdown, although some Republicans, eager to show their distaste for the president’s unilateral action in freeing millions of illegal immigrants from the threat of deportation did cause, did defect. It was the Democrats who almost succeeded in shutting down the government and President Obama, not House speaker John Boehner, who had to struggle to get this resolution passed. The battle will have important consequences for the shape of American political life during the two years remaining of his term, and perhaps far into the future. Here’s why.

This resolution does more than merely approve a continuation of existing funding arrangements. It is rather like a Christmas tree, strewn beneath with packages for congressmen who have been nice, and even some who have been naughty to the House leadership. The bill includes provisions that would:

· raise the limits on individual political contributions from $32,400 to $324,000,

· force the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce its staffing to the lowest level since 1989 and prevent it from applying the Clean Water Act to farm ponds and irrigation ditches,

· make it easier for school districts to get out from under Mrs. Obama’s notions of healthy eating,

· continue to ban the administration from transferring to the U.S. terrorists held in Guantanamo,

· ban taxpayer funding for official portraits of executive branch employees and lawmakers,

· prohibit the District of Columbia from legalizing marijuana, and

· ease Dodd-Frank restrictions on derivatives trading by big banks.

All of these are anathema to liberal Democrats, but it is this latter provision that sent their blood pressure soaring beyond medically approved levels. Obama, who antagonized many Democrats by agreeing early on to sign the bill, thereby reducing their bargaining power in the waning hours of Thursday night, pointed out that the bill also includes funds for programs he and they favor. It would increase spending on early childhood education and on measures to reduce the threat of climate change, give him $5.4 billion of the $6 billion he requested to fight the spread of Ebola, and fund military actions against ISIS. The bill, in short, is a compromise, a word unused by right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats for so many years that it is no longer in their available vocabularies.

Oh yes, the bill also provides more funding than the president requested for security at U.S. embassies, but bans the spending of any embassy construction funds on the new £600 million U.S. embassy in London, which will now be paid for by selling off other property. If, that is, the Duke of Westminster will buy the land, which he has so far refused to do unless America compensates him for the lands taken from his ancestors during the American Revolution. But I digress.

Boehner threw a bone to his Tea Partiers by extending the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, which is to implement Obama’s new rules on illegal immigrants, only until February, rather than until September, as is the case with all other departments. That gives his hard-liners the opportunity to fight another day, although since the new immigration regulations are self-funding from fees to be paid by the immigrants, it is unclear how de-funding can reverse the president’s decision.

Many Brits are known to enjoy a pint a day. Winston Churchill certainly did—though his daily ration was a pint of champagne, not ale. So it was fitting that the wartime prime minister was toasted last week in Washington with clinking glasses of bubbly. House speaker John Boehner invited a small group—of which The Scrapbook was happily part—to celebrate two birthdays: that of the great man himself, and that of the bust in the Capitol that honors him. One was the 140th, the other just the first.

To meteorologists, an inversion is a deviation from the normal change of an atmospheric property. It can lead to pollution and adverse health effects. To Wall Street dealmakers, and now to most boards of directors, an inversion is a cross-border merger that allows the buyer to reincorporate in a more tax-friendly jurisdiction.

One of the many things that The Scrapbook doesn’t like about life in modern Washington—aside from the politics, of course—is the extent to which the nation’s capital, especially its downtown core, has become a high-pitch security zone. Access to public spaces and buildings is severely restricted; there are several competing police jurisdictions, all eager to respond to perceived emergencies.